Pieter

“You used to be able to push open the little door inside the church and find yourself in a delightful piece of waste ground, covered with vegetation, where your feet might stumble against some of the oldest stones in Paris. Hard by the chevet of St Julian one of the last vestiges of 'Philippe Auguste's Wall' stuck up abruptly out of the long grass like a rock emerging from the sea, and a twisted tree, slowly dying beneath the weight of several centuries, still sprouted leaves that quivered overhead. Who remembers that place, so attuned to day-dreaming? In the distance the towers of Notre-Dame, white in stormy weather, looked black against the July sky, and the occasional tugboat on the Seine would utter a long-drawn-out, melancholy cry, the misty note lingering, and fading into the blue beyond. Yet the hubbub of Paris seemed to die at the edges of that small solitude where I loved to come and think. The silence around me was like a dwelling in which the past had sought refuge.”
― Julien Green, Paris

“Describe a cat for me,’ Morgo said. ‘Let it take shape in your mind. All your recollections and associations with cats.’
Thors Provoni thought about cats. It seemed a harmless thing to do as they waited out the six days until they reached Earth.
‘Opinionated’ Morgo said at last.
‘Me, you mean? On the subject?’
‘No, I mean cats. And self-centred.’
Angrily, Provoni said, ‘A cat is loyal to its master. But shows it in a subtle way. That’s the whole point, a cat gives himself to no one, and this has been his way for millions of years, and then you manage to knock a chink in his armor, and he rubs against you and sits on your lap and purrs. So, because of his love for you, he breaks the inherent genetic behavior-pattern of two million years. What a victory that is.’
‘Assuming the cat is sincere,’ Morgo said, ‘Rather than trying to cadge extra food.’
‘You think a cat can be a hypocrite?’ Provoni asked. ‘I’ve never heard an insinuation of insincerity directed towards cats. Actually, much of the critisism comes from their brutal honesty; if they don’t like a person then shit, they’re of to someone else.’
‘I think,’ Morgo said, ‘When we get to Terra I would like to have a dog.”
― Philip K. Dick, Our Friends From Frolix 8

“In fact, they use everyone and have always used everyone, because they are from the old time, the time before all the worlds awoke from a long and mindless night. And these dreams, these things that are called dreams, are still working to throw us back into that great mad darkness, to exhaust each one one of us in our lonely sleep and to use up everyone until death.”
― Thomas Ligotti, Noctuary

“The Labyrinth

Zeus himself could not undo the web
of stone closing around me, I have forgotten the men I was before; I follow the hated
path of monotonous walls
that is my destiny. Severe galleries
which curve in secret circles
to the end of the years. Parapets
cracked by the day’s usury.
In the pale dust I have discerned
signs that frighten me. In the concave
evenings the air has carries a roar
toward me, or the echo of a desolate howl.
I know there is an Other in the shadows,
whose fate it is to wear out the long solitudes
which weave and unweave this Hades
and to long for my blood and devour my death.
Each of us seeks the other. If only this were the final day of waiting.

- S.K.”
― Jorge Luis Borges, Selected Poems